House GOP kills last hope for immigration bill

The last remaining hope for an immigration bill to get through Congress died Thursday morning when House leadership informed Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., that his bill would not be considered this year.

Diaz-Balart has been the main Republican responsible for crafting the House version of an immigration overhaul. At times, he was working with a bipartisan group of legislators to find an immigration overhaul that would be tolerable in the Republican-led House. He was repeatedly encouraged by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and other GOP leaders to continue working on the bill.

But after meeting with House leadership Thursday morning, he says, he was told the end had come.

“I’m really, really disappointed,” he said after the meeting. “We have a good bill. We have a unique opportunity to secure our borders, fix our broken immigration system, help our economy and do so in a way that adheres to the rule of law. But, unfortunately, I’ve been told we’re not going to be able to pursue it. And I think that’s highly unfortunate.”

Any immigration bill already faced long odds in the GOP-led House. Boehner said all along that he would not take up an immigration overhaul passed by the Senate last year that included a pathway to citizenship for most of the nation’s undocumented immigrants.

And even though Boehner and other Republican leaders said they would pursue their own, piecemeal version of immigration changes, the chamber hasn’t acted on an immigration bill in more than a year. They laid out “principles” earlier this year of what their immigration bill could look like, but those ideas were never written into a bill or filed in the House.

That left Diaz-Balart and a small group of other House members crafting their own bill that could attract enough Republican support to reach the floor. Working closely with Democrats such as Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., and supportive Republicans such as Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., they spent months lobbying fellow members and selling them on their version of immigration reform.

But all that came to an end Thursday. Diaz-Balart said he was not surprised, but was still disappointed by the decision.

“A lot of work has taken place in the last year and a half. A lot of people have taken a lot of arrows,” he said. “If anyone has a change of heart, however, we’re ready to go.”